Et Seq.

The idea that Aquinas is somehow a patron of the empirical sciences seems to me to involve an unjustified assumption that any advance in learning must somehow owe a debt to Aquinas.

I have to intervene, here. I really don’t see how any such false enthymeme is involved. I can think of no standard account of the significance of Aquinas for thought that does not involve his defense of natural reason, which proceeds from the readily known to the finally to-be-known, by means of a synthesis of Aristotle (from whom attention to particular beings as such, rather than as mere examples of ideals) and Augustine (from whom attention to the method of coming to understand eternal realities by means of both things and words, culminating in charity rather than comprehension). I mean, Aquinas is not a scientist, himself, to be true. In fact, I would argue that he is only a philosopher insofar as he finds it necessary to prevent theology students from following speculations into error, and to defend the proper use of natural reason in the elucidation of truth. But it is precisely insofar as he found it obligatory and was chiefly notable for that defense of a true synthesis over against rival bifurcating errors (true to the Dominican emphasis on anti-dualist polemic) that Aquinas became first controversial and then essential to philosophy.

Here’s how things look to those of us who don’t take your line. From the moment modern empirical science began to develop, the Thomas Aquinas Fan Club began to spit on it. For centuries, they did everything in their power to destroy it. (Locke was denied a chair at Oxford because he wanted to do empirical science – in fact, medical science – and the Platonists couldn’t put up with that.) And now, with the Thomas Aquinas Fan Club having been proved disastrously wrong about empirical science, suddenly y’all want us all to forget about that, and you even strut around claiming credit (“you can’t have Francis Bacon without Aquinas” – really?) for developments that you did everything in your power to discredit and prevent.

I really don’t want to offer a ham-handed criticism of your History of Ideas, here, but I can’t follow you either on the standard-ish Heideggerian line, or on the line I learned as a teenager reading my way through as much of the Britannica Great Books and the Harvard Five-Foot Shelf of Books as I could–starting with Locke, then wending my way back to Descartes, then forward again…and especially not on the line I’ve been following since I reached the conclusion of my post-structuralist inquiry and tipped over into metaphysical realism (quite by accident, from my own point of view; I knew theology and ecclesiology demanded Real Presence, and the rest followed as a matter of analogical fitness).

That “Thomism” lapsed into something rather less than what Aquinas made of it is pretty unremarkable–see under any “ism” derived from the work of a seminal thinker. Wooden copying of cherry-picked conclusions is pretty much what we lesser minds end up doing with the greats, after all. It is important to notice that “High Scholastic” thought is almost entirely dominated by opponents of Aquinas, though; and that the new Aristotelian thought he championed was what rescued Augustine from Platonic reduction and reversed the poles of aprioristic Ptolemaic thought.

What Aquinas did not do was simply take the other side of a Platonic bifurcation between Ideal and Real, or assimilate revelation to one and reason to the other. He argued that natural reason could operate on its own because it was created, and the revelation was necessary to complete the created purpose of natural reason. BOTH were divine gifts to real humans, and BOTH gave humans access to reality.

Again, you really have to take the measure of the narrowing of the discourse that happened from the 13th century to the time of Locke. Locke’s argument with the Platonists was an intramural argument among Ockhamist, Scotist, Platonist inheritors of the Franciscan/Augustinian heritage, and that argument tended to center on the priority or the subsequent harmony of two faculties presumed to have radically different principles. Within that strain, Locke is a pre-eminent champion of the possibility of concord, but his efforts are limited by his need to justify himself in terms of that narrowed discussion.

More empirical facts are better than fewer, but they are not a good apart from and incommensurable with other goods, such as the respect for the integrity of human bodies that should have prevented a science from founding itself on stolen corpses and bodies in Bell jars.